Q.
It’s been 64 years, yet Bernard Herrman’s musical score for Hitchcock’s Psycho movie continues to feature prominently in rankings of the Top Film Scores Ever.

The American Film Institute, for instance, rates Herrmann’s Psycho score at #4, after John Williams’ Star Wars, Max Steiner’s Gone with the Wind and Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia.

What do we know about Herrman’s  Psycho musical creation?

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A.

Bernard Herrmann was also the composer behind Vertigo, Citizen Kane, North by  Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Taxi Driver and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

Starting with the music itself: do you notice anything unique about the score in this original trailer?

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Herrmann’s score relies almost entirely on strings. You’ll hear no brass, no woodwinds. The strings are muted for creepy effect, and they provide the percussive emphasis. Herrmann wanted to create a ‘black and white’ score to compliment Hitchcock’s black and white movie.

Hitchcock was so delighted with the score – “33% of the success of Psycho was due to the music,” he said – that he doubled Herrmann’s salary.

Herrmann was passionate about his work in film, radio and television. In an emphatic response to a critic who had denigrated film music as a genre, Herrmann wrote: ‘Music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.’

Film analysts have noted that even though nothing horrifying happens at the start of the movie – stay tuned 🥶  – our terror starts to build based solely on the music.

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“There’s somebody sitting up in the window…”

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Artwork: Psycho. Produced + Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam… 1960.